The Continuing Existence of Tony Thompson
by madasmonty
Summary: "It was Tony Thompson's seventeenth birthday, and he was trying to kill himself. He was going to do it this time. ..." Tony is severely depressed. Will Rudolph be able to save him?  Warning: Contains self-harm/suicide attempts/swearing COMPLETE
1. The Killing Lights

**Chapter One**

**The Killing Lights**

_**"They remember  
>Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut you up,<br>Cut you up"  
><strong>_**- "The Killing Lights", A.F.I**

It was Tony Thompson's fifteenth birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

He'd tried before, of course, but his continued existence testified, to his lack of success in that particular field of endeavour.

Tony took out his pocketknife, prised open the largest blade, plucked a bit of fluff from the tip, set it down on the table, and folded up the cuff of his sleeve. He considered a moment, and then he went over to the towel rack, selected one of his grey towels, arranged it on the tabletop, and set his left arm down on it, his pale skin gleaming faintly, white shot with sapphire veins.

_Up the aisle, not across the corridor... Right?_

Pensively he weighed his options. A horizontal cut would, one would think, open _more_ veins, but a vertical outlet along a single vein would permit a great deal more in volume to issue from that particular specimen.

Maybe he should try one of each?

_And have a very symbolic crucifix-shaped mark,_ he noted.

He sighed, somewhat fondly, and then, with a surgeon's precision, cut a straight, clean line along his most prominent vein.

It hurt.

Like Hell.

With a bit of acid thrown in for good measure.

Thinking about it, cutting the morning's grapefruit with a future suicide tool had not been very forward-thinking. Then again, neither had most of the actions and ideas that composed his life.

"Bloody Hell," Tony said, and he smiled, because that phrase quite adequately summed up his existence.

Speaking of blood, it welled, pooled, and spilled, and Tony, professional failure, ruined another towel.

It was a bit of a pity, because he wasn't exactly rolling in the dough, and towels, like virtually everything in existence, cost money to replace.

He watched the blood flow, watched it surge and seethe and seep into his forsaken little towel, the stark red fading quickly to a coppery brown.

That was all right with him. The colour transition was pretty neatly analogous to the way he felt about life.

More blood poured, gradually and persistently, and Tony started feeling lightheaded. Was that the process that preceded death? Detachment, light-headedness… Then what? Heaven? Hell? Oblivion?

Well, with any luck, he'd find out momentarily.

Would it be worth it, he wondered, if there was no promise of anything to follow?

"Tony, are you there?"

Anna's voice tore him from the warm arms of his reverie. What the Hell was _she _doing here? She wasn't due 'til six at the earliest.

"I'm changing," He announced, knowing as he did that it would only encourage her to enter. He mentally cursed his stupidity.

"I need to talk to you…"

She was unlocking the door, so Tony fumbled with the towel, his fingers slipping in the blood. But, as with every event in his pathetic excuse for an unending life, his opponent was faster.

Anna screamed, Tony sighed, and ten minutes, a lot of applied pressure, and a great deal of protesting later, he was in the emergency room.

It was an unfortunate part of this tradition that it often ushered in a rousing hospital bill to pay off over the course of the three hundred and sixty-five days until the next attempt.

Once released from the hospital (having consistently repeated a highly dubious story about knife-throwing practice for his carnival routine in order to avoid psychological counselling), Tony returned to the apartment building, lay on the bed, and wept.


	2. Hang

**Chapter Two**

**Hang**

"_**But if things don't work out like we think  
>And there's nothing there to ease this ache<br>And if there's nothing there to make things change  
>If it's the same for you, I'll just hang"<br>**_**– "Hang", Matchbox Twenty **

It was Tony Thompson's sixteenth birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

Again.

Tony had embarked on an important errand this morning. He had gone to the hardware store and purchased a length of rope, and he had subsequently gone to the library to attempt to determine how it was one went about tying a noose.

Then he went and bought himself some cake.

It _was_ his birthday, after all.

He climbed onto his silver step-stool and extended his arms upward, but he couldn't reach the beam. Accordingly, he took his desk chair, set it beneath the desired slab of wood, and arranged the step-stool on the seat. Slinging the coiled rope over one shoulder, he clambered up to the height of the tower and reached for the rafter.

His makeshift ladder shuddered and wobbled beneath his weight, but he swung the end of the rope over and began twisting at it, trying to create that inimitable, highly ominous, noose shape. He hoped his tower wouldn't give way; he might crack his head open on the floor and die.

And dying would defeat the whole purpose of killing himself.

Frowning, Tony tried to thread the rope through its own coils, racking his brain for a clearer image of the diagram he'd studied.

The rope looked about right, or about as close to right as it was going to get. Tony paused to consider it, nodded to himself, and managed to get down to the floor without severely fracturing his spinal cord, and it was there that he sat down at his chipped desk and thought about writing a note.

_Adieu, world; we never would have worked out together_?

Nah. Maybe _It's not me; it's you, you miserable bitch_.

Well, the whole act of suicide kind of expressed that general theme. He didn't want to spell it out.

Maybe he should leave a few wonderfully vindictive words—give them something to remember him by. _I should have killed you when I had the chance_. Let them figure out who it meant. Everyone would assume it was them, because everyone, some deeper down than others, wanted to be important. There was a wretched significance to the second person of a suicide note, and many of them, against their wills and better judgments, would seize on it.

He paused, pen in hand.

He was making a crucial assumption, and it was probably an erroneous one.

He was assuming that someone would read it.

He put the pen down and looked at it, straight and plain and plastic on his blotter, a delicate gleam of afternoon light icing its angles. There was a quick, simple beauty to it. It might have been enough to make a better man turn back.

He was so tired of turning back.

Again he bested his poor excuse for a stepladder, and then he positioned his neck within the noose and tugged on it a little to tighten it to fit. Not much happened, but Tony supposed that it probably wasn't much like the movies in real life very often.

The twine had shredded his shirt, the better to cinch slowly tighter around him and dig tiny thorn-like teeth into his skin.

He didn't feel it.

He kicked the footstool, and both it and the chair toppled to the floor.

There was a jerk, his stomach dropped, and he had a long three seconds to stare down at the new dents in the floor before the rope slipped free and sent his face to their level such that he could examine them more closely.

"Son of a bitch," Tony said.

He didn't move for a long time, and then it was to get up, redistribute the fallen tower of furniture, and collect the rope. He tossed it into his suitcase.

There was always next year.


	3. Wonderful Life

**Chapter Three**

**Wonderful Life**

"_**She says: **__**Don't let go  
>Never give up, it's such a wonderful life"<strong>_

"**Wonderful Life", The Hurts**

It was Tony Thompson's seventeenth birthday, and he was trying to kill himself.

He was going to do it this time. He was; he was; he _was_. He was going to stop his stubborn heart from beating and his ornery blood from flowing, and his cold, cold eyes would fall closed for the last time.

He couldn't wait, really. It was better than when the Nintendo Wii had come out.

He turned to the suitcase lying on his bed. It gaped at him dumbly, zipper teeth lining its cavernous mouth, and he moved to sneer and then changed his mind.

The faithful case was home to a pocketknife, a length of rope, a gun and a few clinking bullets, a bottle of pills and a bottle of vodka (which might well still be good; alcohol liked to evaporate, but he didn't know that it went _bad_), a map of the city, a bit of sand, and a book of matches. He knocked back the rest of the pills, added the contents of the vial, washed them both down with some vodka (the pills still stuck on the way down, the little bastards), tucked the gun into the waistband of his pants, cut a few vindictive slashes into his wrists, and with dripping hands draped the rope around his shoulders. He was going to go hang himself from a major bridge, then set the rope on fire.

It was going to be _awesome_.

He made it almost to the door before his vision blurred, his knees gave way, and he became intimately acquainted with the floor.

This was not as dignified as he might have hoped, but he supposed that death, by definition, never really was. Dignity was for the living, who could defend it.

It was warm, and… warm… and…

His eyelids drifted downward.

Then there was a shuffling and a faint creak, and the door whisked open and hit him in the back of the knees.

He opened his eyes fully again and memorized the nearest dust ball.

"Tony!" a voice prompted bewilderedly. "Tony, what the hell—"

He closed his eyes.

He opened his eyes again, to the sharpening of a dim, quiet room in shades of a colour that fell between dark teal and that "moss green" that doesn't really resemble moss in the slightest. He could have sworn there was a fancy word for it—celadon, or something?

Or was that a dinosaur?

There was a silhouette carved in black silk by the window. Tony almost recognized it, but there was something… missing.

Then the figure turned, and it was Rudolph. Minus the red eyes.

"Thank you," Tony tried to say, but what came out was, "You got contact lenses?"

That was life for you. And everyone wondered why he was so eager to get rid of it.

Rudolph nodded slowly, and Tony nodded reflectively in reply—to _have_ something to reply. "Took long enough," he decided.

Rudolph had his arms folded, and on anyone else, it would have been a closed gesture, a dismissive one, but somehow he made it welcoming.

Or perhaps that was just the attempted suicide talking.

"How are you feeling?" Rudolph inquired, his eyes on something to the left of the hospital bed. For the first time, Tony looked down and around him. He was connected, by wires and tubes and God knew what else, to a series of machines the functions and purposes of which he couldn't even hazard, let alone fathom. He blinked a bit, and the EKG beeped placidly, as if in response. Like a bass beat underlining his continued life. As if the rhythm to it gave it a reason.

"Alive," he said, which was just about as accurate as answers came.

A ghost of a smile crossed Rudolph's face. "I should hope so," he remarked.

"I shouldn't," he replied.

There was a pause.

"You split your head open on the floor," Rudolph explained, probably for lack of anything to say.

"It figures," Rudolph observed placidly.

"Eighteen stitches," Rudolph noted

"Lovely," Tony concluded.

Rudolph's eyes took on another layer of verdure yet. "Why'd you do it?" he whispered.

Tony hesitated. He licked dry lips and raised a bound hand to touch his collarbones, his chin, his lips. To reassure himself that it was all still there, deliberately marred as it might have been.

"Because every time I opened my eyes," he responded softly, "I saw a world of nothing but hate. Because people killed, and people died, and nobody cared if what they did left someone else crying. Because no one _cared_."

"I care," Rudolph said quietly.


	4. Happy Birthday

**Epilogue**

**Happy Birthday**

"_**Happy Birthday to you  
>Happy Birthday to you"<strong>_

"**Happy Birthday", Traditional birthday song**

Three years later to the day, there was a brisk knock on the door of Tony's apartment. Grumbling aimlessly, he pushed his calculations away, shoved his chair back, stood, and went to answer.

The first thing he saw was a very large chocolate cake rather too close to his face.

The second thing he saw was the lettering, which read _Happy Birthday Tony_.

"You forgot a comma," he said.

"Fuck you," Gregory responded affably.

"Fuck yourself," Tony returned cheerfully.

"Boys," Anna warned.

"Happy birthday, Tony," Rudolph said, smiling.

And it kind of was.

No, it definitely was.

THE END


End file.
